Backed by CIA funding, Pixlogic software can be “visually programmed” to monitor video feeds in real time to search for certain events or elements.

The software sees objects in a picture or video frame and makes a mathematical formulation to describe them. The formulations are stored in a searchable database and compared to the formulations for objects that are already filed.

A commercial version, Pixserve, will allow users to point to an image and ask it to retrieve similar images in the database.